In contrast to the aftermath of World War I, the United States launched into post-World War II occupation of enemy territories equipped with fairly well-crafted blueprints. In the case ofJapan, committees of experts set up within the State and War Departments began discussing postwar plans within six months of the Pearl Harbor attack. By early 1945, the coordinating committee of the State, War, and Navy Departments formulated SWNCC 150/2 as the basic policy toward postsurrender Japan. The occupation’s objective, as stated in
The document, was to ensure "that Japan [would] not again become a menace to the peace and security of the world"; a reformed Japan was to be readmitted "as a responsible and peaceful member of the family of nations." Voicing these lofty goals, the United States set out to cleanse Japan of militarism and strengthen what "Japan hands" in the State Department, such as former ambassador Joseph Grew, believed to be that nation’s innate democratic tendencies that had been temporarily suppressed by the hex of militarism in the 1930s.354
SCAP’s most immediate task was to dismantle Japan’s war machine. This was to be done not only by disarming troops and impounding munitions factories, but also, starting in January 1946, through "purges" of officials, journalists, educators, and businessmen who had collaborated with the prewar militarist state. Before the program’s end in May 1948, over 200,000 individuals were affected. Next, those identified as war criminals were brought before an international military tribunal convened in Tokyo. Between May 1946 and November 1948, twenty-eight Japanese leaders were put on trial for planning and initiating an unjust war of aggression, but the emperor’s name was conspicuously absent from the indictment. MacArthur opposed any attempt to bring the emperor to trial on the grounds that it would turn the local populace against the United States and eliminate all chances of peaceful administration of the occupied land. Seven defendants, including former prime ministers Hideki Tojo and Koki Hirota, were condemned to death by hanging.355
SCAP governed Japan through the nation’s existing political institutions, including the emperor. The burden ofdirect military rule that was being felt in Germany led American generals and civilian officials to decide not to duplicate the experience in Japan. Nor did Japan’s sooner-than-expected surrender allow training of the manpower needed for direct military rule. Many of the members of the complex occupation bureaucracy had little knowledge or experience of the country they had to govern and reform. The lack of knowledgeable personnel at times resulted in improvisation and uncritically transplanting American institutions to Japan. Some programs aimed at converting
Japan to “American democratic ideals," such as land and electoral reforms, were successfully implemented through Japanese initiatives and by relying on indigenous expertise. Yet defeat acted as a catalyst for radical changes in Japan’s social and political institutions. Mandated by a victor who professed democratic principles and visions of an open world order, reforms materialized that perhaps would have been impossible with indigenous forces alone. Changes ran a wide gamut, from female suffrage and the revision of the gender-repressive Civil Code, to the abolition of licensed prostitution, the adoption of a pacifist constitution renouncing in Article IX the use of military force as an instrument of national policy, the abolition of the peerage, the encouragement of labor unionism, the liberalization of education, and economic deconcentration.
But the transformative nature of occupation-era reforms should not be overstated. Once the initial shock of defeat wore off, Japanese officials began to take charge of their own affairs and devised ways to subvert the intent of policies mandated by the occupier. The reorientation of US occupation policy after 1947 put a tailwind behind those Japanese officials who sought to reinstate elements of the old governing regime. Once the nation regained independence in April 1952, some of the reforms instituted over the previous seven years, like antimonopoly enactments, were reversed or eviscerated. A result of this binational collaboration in political backsliding was that, as historian W. G. Beasley once observed, “one can trace today [1995] a far greater continuity with the recent past than would at one time have seemed possible. "356
The occupation period was a bridge linking the old and the new in another way. It refueled the Americanization ofJapanese mass culture, a permutation ofthe phenomenon commonly seen during the Cold War wherever American forces were stationed.357 In the interwar period, American-style consumerism had made major inroads into Japan, particularly among the urban middle class. Jazz, cafes, dance halls, movie theaters, and American youth apparel and accompanying free-spirited and individualistic social mores became familiar fixtures of urban life. American household amenities and lifestyles were envied and coveted as emblems of “modern life." The Japanese fascination with things American had been temporarily buried during the national
Mobilization and forced austerity that began in the late 1930s, but the arrival of occupation forces and their dependents ignited its postwar revival. Consumer goods and electrical appliances displayed in PXes (post exchanges, stores operated by the US Army on its bases) fed the acquisitive fantasy of the battered and impoverished local population and established the attainment of material comfort as the legitimate goal of a peace-loving and “democratic" citizenry. Food, music, sports, and other forms ofpopular entertainment came under heavy American influences, due in no small part to the presence of US troops.358 This resumed cultural adaptation would become a fortifying ingredient of the social and cultural underpinning of the Cold War partnership and helped the bilateral relationship withstand the wear and tear of divergent national priorities in high politics.
World History
